The Little Fish keep snapping away at the Biggies

Editor's Note: You can listen to Anamitra Roy and Sriparna Dey, founding members of Little Fish Eat Big Fish, in this WBRi interview-feature.

Calcutta, Jan 11, 2012 (Washington Bangla Radio / Penning Creations) Little Fish Eat Big Fish (LFEBF), is named with a theme in mind of exemplifying the possibility of film makers at the bottom of the rung beating the commercial experts at their own game. Well not quite.

The co founder of this little film making community, Anamitra Ray has been a film maker for merely a few years and he reckons it’s not about making commercial gain or raking in the big crowds and walking the red carpets. This is more a chance for artists or people with similar inclinations to pursue the art of storytelling via the audio-visual medium.

To think of independent low budget film making, you might think of a seedy story with a self hyped artistic sense coming out of a yearning to be different for the sake of proving something above the silly masses.

In all fairness, many things you see nowadays are attempted works of genius gone horribly sideways. Then again you do get diamonds in a rough cut among rocks. This here may be it.

With the advent of radio, then television, books have largely gone out of fashion – at least they’re not as depended on as they used to be unless you take in to account the books you read in school and universities. The literary works which once used to be consumed off printed pages now possibly lay ignored, unless of course a big production house decides to take up a script written on it with the big stars in mind for casting.

With LFEBF, the focus lies solely on stories which were once available widely but are now almost going out of people’s know due to the lack of being accessed. This isn’t to say that the group is just about restoring the validity and influence of old classics but also a chance a to give the young film makers a prominent chance to make their own films, based on their own created stories.

In the last few years, they have had interest from online distributors who release their films on the internet and then spread the word. The whole concept of this kind of movie making lies in the lack of much money exchanging hands. Micro budget or zero budget films, whatever you want to call it, basically involves getting as much done for as little cost as possible. If you’re in it, you’re in it for the passion, not the penny.

Take Shohor a.k.a City, about to be released this year. It appears to be an ode to Kolkata in its full vigor of parental pressure, educational stress, and all the different factors a young person would have to battle during their growing years. It shifts the light on parent teenager relationships, including a slightly stereotypical but very real exchange between fathers threatening to throw the son out of the house. You would even find some of the big winded advices you’d get from a friend in denial of being in the same boat as you.

This is just one film. There are other exploring similarly real situations, bringing reality on to the screen. However it isn’t something that intends to show up on television screens or the common mediums of consumption for the masses. This is more an appreciation society, looking for only those people to join the appreciation bandwagon, who really do understand the motives of these projects.

They may be few in number but they’re growing. The website gets hits from across the world, most likely fellow low budget film makers, but nevertheless. The support and appreciation keeps trickling up the charts, and you never know what the future holds. Could be not so good, or it may well could be. There isn’t much of a reason why it shouldn’t.

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